karolisram

Recently I found that my country's (Lithuania) parliament provides a way to get quite a bit of data in regards to questions being raised, voting results, business trips, etc. One problem is that the data is in XML format with an undocumented schema.

I am going to clean up and organize the data but was wondering whether someone could recommend any existing tools that can help make this data accessible to any half-savvy computer user?

The goal is to help citizens make better voting decisions in upcoming election. I hope that being able to see what particular politician voted for/against in the past, and other relevant data, will enable make more informed data-driven decision whom to vote for. Thus, what's probably needed is an intuitive user interface for inspecting all this data but I hope to avoid the pleasure of having to build such interface myself.

TL;DR: Is spending a year immediately after college learning MOOCs to discover what niche to specialize in computing a generally good idea?

Hi guys,

A little background. I am about to graduate from a university in 3 months with a Computer Science degree and am already experiencing pains trying to decide what to do next. I generally did well in all the disciplines, from Operating Systems to Security to AI and so on. But since you don't delve deeply into any topics while at university, I am left confused in what I would actually like to specialize in later on.

Currently, I work for my university developing their app, and have good skills in front-end in general. However, there seems to be a lot more interesting niches out there such as data science, robotics, embedded programming.

But before I make full jump into any of these new areas, I would like to test them all out and get a better feeling of what I might like doing best for the next decade or so.

Do you think spending a year learning from MOOCs, creating own personal projects is a good idea? Or would it perhaps be better to find work immediately, or find some really good internships? The problem with finding work is that with my current skills I am not confident I would be able to get the job in the niche I might want to try out. This is essentially what the year would be spent on, researching different niches, trying out some personal projects and then pursuing the needed skills to get a job in the niche that really catches my interest.

Any input is highly appreciated! How did you find your own niche to specialize in? How would you go about jobs hunting or getting relevant experience in this situation?

Listening to podcasts has been a major discovery for me. In the beginning I was listening to just a couple podcasts and made sure to listen to each of their new episodes. Recently I discovered a few more effective strategies when listening to podcasts which I want to share with you.

First, it’s much more effective and satisfying to subscribe to a bunch of high quality podcasts and only listen to the episodes that sound truly interesting. Second, you can start listening pretty much any podcast from 1 minute mark and some even further, such as 5 minutes, and not miss a thing. This is due to advertisements in the beginning, slow introduction and fluff in general. Finally, when an advert comes, skipping in 15 seconds intervals is very effective for getting back to listening actual content.

Do you know any additional strategies, tips and tricks to get the most out of podcasts?

Additionally, I’m curious to hear what podcasts fellow HN readers with similar interests are listening to. To give you a short background, I’m a final year Computer Science student; full-stack developer, with focus on front-end development; interested in entrepreneurship, mastery and balanced, healthy living. If you have anything to share or want to show your own subscription list, please do!